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Vans Family Loyalty Program & App

Overview
Commerce platforms are good at getting the first purchase. Earning the second and beyond is harder.

Vans had millions of customers but mostly transactional relationships with them. A great purchase didn’t lead anywhere. There was no connective tissue between buying, engagement, and the brand people already felt loyal to.

Vans Family was the answer. A membership and loyalty platform spanning mobile and web, built to turn one-time buyers into members with a reason to come back. The goal was to connect commerce directly to engagement, retention, and lifetime value.

The Opportunity
At most brands, loyalty lives off to the side. A points balance buried in an account page, disconnected from the experience of actually shopping.

We saw an opportunity to treat membership as part of the commerce experience, not a layer bolted onto it. That meant designing for a few realities:

• Customers moved between the Vans app and the web, and it had to feel like one membership, not two
• Loyalty needed to reward the behaviors that mattered, repeat purchases, engagement, and brand participation, not just transactions for discounts
• The program had to scale across a global, multi-market business

The Approach
I led the design of the platform across mobile and web, partnering closely with product, marketing, and engineering.

We built Vans Family around a few core ideas:
• Enrollment that met customers inside the shopping flow, not in a separate silo
• A member hub that made status, rewards, and benefits clear and motivating
• Rewards tied to the actions that drive lifetime value, repeat purchase, and ongoing engagement
• Early access to drops and collaborations and access to exclusive perks and experiences, making membership culturally valuable, not just points for discounts
• A consistent member identity across app and web, anchored in the Vans design system

Home Screen - Profile - Account

The Approach
I led design of the platform across mobile and web, partnering closely with product, marketing, and engineering.

We built Vans Family around a few core ideas:
• Enrollment that met customers inside the shopping flow, not in a separate silo
• A member hub that made status, rewards, and benefits clear and motivating
• Rewards tied to the actions that drive lifetime value, repeat purchase and ongoing engagement
• Early and exclusive access to drops and collaborations, making membership culturally valuable, not just points
• A consistent member identity across app and web, anchored in the Vans design system

Designing Across Platforms
The hardest part wasn’t any single screen. It was cohesion.

A member needed to recognize the experience whether they opened the app or landed on the site. We built shared patterns and a unified member identity so status, rewards, and benefits stayed consistent across touchpoints, while still letting each platform do what it does best.

This built on the same systems thinking behind the rest of the Vans commerce platform. Consistent foundations, room to move on top of them.

Redeem - PDP - Checkout

Impact
• Connected commerce directly to membership, engagement, and retention
• Millions of registered users in first 12 months of program launch
• Increased repeat orders by 3x
• Vans Family members average cart size increased by 2x
• Strengthened customer lifetime value across a global base
• Established a membership foundation the brand could keep building on